Tag Archives: Facebook

In its bid to ensure the people on Facebook are who they say they are, the social media giant has added yet another verification tool. From now on, people who manage a Page with a large US audience will have to complete an authorization process if they want to continue posting in their account.

With this authorization process in place, Facebook is looking to protect compromised accounts as well as limiting the reach of fake accounts. By asking the managers of the Page in question to secure their account with two-factor authentication and confirm their primary country location, the issues Facebook has been facing can be restricted.

It’s passive zombie feed scrolling, not active communication with friends that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet it’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital well being screentime management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the US before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.

POP QUIZ: WHAT tech mogul dropped out of Harvard after two years to found a tech company that conquered the world? If you answered Mark Zuckerberg, congratulations! You are correct. And if you answered Bill Gates, congratulations: You are also correct!

And the interesting thing is, it’s not just Harvard. The more you compare the two, the more similar they seem. It’s as if they were cloned from the same DNA: They both were born the only boy into a wealthy family. They both have doting, indulgent mothers, who believed they could do no wrong and instilled in them both a preternatural self confidence.

Is Facebook using your computer camera to read your facial expressions and determine how you feel about what you see on your screen? Is it using your phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you and find out what television programs you watch? Is it tracking your phone’s location in the middle of the night to find out where you live?

Maybe not, or at least not yet. But the company has applied for patents to do all these things, and many others, all of them intended to study your behavior and personality and even predict your future, in order to better serve Facebook’s customers. You may think that’s you, but it’s actually Facebook’s advertisers, which account for 99 percent of its revenue.

Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.

TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.

Let the upcoming fourth quarter be known as the incubator phase of the six-second video ad unit, a few industry players echoed in recent days. Next year, they say, it’s go time.

The format has built up buzz since Google threw its stake in the ground when the best examples of its six-second hackathon were highlighted at Sundance in January. Then in June, Fox announced it was on board with six-second video ads. And, at the end of last month, Facebook revealed it was going to work on its six-second ad game during its second-quarter earnings call. Now, brands and agencies are starting to state their motives for getting out in front of the movement. Michelin this week started testing the snack-sized clips on YouTube, the Google-owned video platform that calls them bumper ads.

As an up-and-coming actress-comedian, Laura Clery spent more than a year doing “free work,” posting on Facebook every day without fail, building an audience for her sketches, characters and video blogging.

Those days are over, as Clery is now one of the first digital influencers to take part in Facebook’s new revenue-sharing program, while also in discussions to make original content for the social media behemoth.

With her 3.1 million Facebook followers, dwarfing what she’d amassed on YouTube, Clery is part of the current crop of internet stars that’s set off a talent grab by Facebook, YouTube and other distribution platforms and brands like AT&T and Verizon’s go90.

On the heels of a temporary $200 price cut, today Facebook’s Oculus has announced that the Rift and Touch will be receiving a permanent $100 price cut, bringing the bundled price of the virtual reality system down to $499 once the summer sale it over. The company has also announced that it will now be bundling the two products together in a single package.

Consumers who see VR as too expensive will undoubtedly welcome the news, but to onlookers the move does leave questions about what exactly is happening over at the Facebook-owned virtual reality company.

Today we tackle Step #4 – How to Perfect Your Lead Generation Follow-up

The current infatuation of the internet marketing set is complex automated lead funnels. Go on Facebook, and you’ll likely be hit with ads offering to show you how to make it rain thousands of leads on autopilot.

While I’m not opposed to teaching lead generation techniques, I do think there is an issue with just thinking about the lead funnel as a standalone. After all, you don’t just want leads—you want new and returning customers on a consistent basis.